13 May 2018 7:28 PM

Typical Russians, eh? They kidnap a man and his pregnant wife in broad daylight, then hide them in a secret prison in an Asian airport where they wield sinister influence.

There they begin to torture him. Despite the fact that she is obviously pregnant, they chain her to a wall and put a hood over her head, for five days.

Next, they swathe her from head to toe in duct tape (in agony, because one of her eyes is taped open) and fly them both to Syria so he can be tortured more thoroughly for several years.

With the two chained and bound prisoners comes a delivery note from the Russian spy chief to his Syrian opposite number: ‘This is the least we could do for you, to demonstrate our remarkable relationship’.

This is the sort of disgusting behaviour we have come to expect from the Kremlin. Except that I have changed the details. This story is not about the Kremlin. It is about the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and our allies in the American CIA. And the man we helped kidnap, Abdel Belhaj was not sent to Syria, but to Libya, whose then despot we were courting.

All the details of this unspeakable, lawless operation are known, and cannot be denied. They came out into the open only because a group of militiamen happened to stumble on the papers in an abandoned office in Tripoli.

The government has admitted their truth by apologising for them, and writing a large cheque (with your hard-earned money, of course) to Mr Belhaj’s wife, Fatima Boudchar. Nobody is even trying to deny them, though the Labour Government ministers in charge at the time (2004) seem to be having some trouble remembering the episode.

There are plenty of things you can think about this, including whether those involved, politicians and civil servants alike, ought to face some kind of justice. I would not hold out many hopes.

My point is this. So much of our current frenzy against Russia and Syria is based on a claim of moral superiority. Do we have any such superiority if we kidnap people and send them to tyrants to be tortured? So shoudn’t we stop pretending that our hostility to Russia and Syria has a moral purpose – and explain what, in that case, our motive really is?

Or are we embarrassed that our motive is almost as sordid as the miserable Belhaj episode?

Certainly since before the 2003 Iraq invasion, which members of the current government mostly supported, this country has been implicated in the most horrible actions, many of which will probably remain secret forever.

Strangely, many of these kidnaps and much of this complicity in unspeakable tortures was justified by our moral fury against Al Qaeda, a movement with whom we now co-operate in Syria.

It is also quite possible to argue (and I do) that the Iraq invasion was the gravest political mistake of our age, closely followed by David Cameron’s attack on Libya.

We are now hurrying towards serious war in the Middle East, lashed to the strange, seemingly unhinged figure of Donald Trump, whose vain, pouting, writhing performance on Tuesday night was one of the most frightening things I have ever seen in my life. Could it possibly have been plainer that he views us not as allies but as minions?

And why shouldn’t he, if we collaborate with the CIA in actions like these?

A proper British government would cease this sort of co-operation, whatever little treats and pats on the head we may be offered in return for it. And a proper British government should also stand aside from war policies in the Middle East which will only lead to still more terror, torture and pain.

*********

Talking of war, and Syria, many of you may have noticed frequent references in the media to a body called the ‘Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’, often quoted as if it is an impartial source of information about that complicated conflict, in which the British government clearly takes sides. The ‘Observatory’ says on its website that it is ‘not associated or linked to any political body.’

To which I reply: Is Boris Johnson’s Foreign Office not a political body? Because the FO just confirmed to me that ‘the UK funded a project worth £194,769.60 to provide the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights with communications equipment and cameras.’ That’s quite a lot, isn’t it? I love the precision of that 60p. Your taxes, impartially, at work.

********

Rosamund Pike is one of the cleverest and wittiest actresses of our time, as she showed in the wonderful ‘An Education’. And it is interesting to see the 1970s, that lost decade, so meticulously recreated. But I am not quite sure about the OK, but flawed new film about the 1976 Entebbe hijack.

The great thing about Entebbe was that the bravery and skill of the Israeli commandos meant almost all the hostages were saved, and the terrorists were killed. This was a distinct turn for the better in an era when hijackers far too often got away with their crimes.

Nobody wept, or wondered if this had been the right thing to do. These disgusting people, Germans among them, had actually separated the Jewish passengers from the others. They were bad enough before they did that. After they did it, they had passed into a zone of evil from which there can be no return.

But there is something dangerously soppy about the film’s attitude towards the hijackers. Sure, they were human. That is precisely why their actions deserved to be ended and punished with violent death. Because they knew better. The film’s apparent belief that negotiation, even with such people, is a good thing is simply untrue.

It is precisely because we have talked to and rewarded so many terrorists, from the PLO to the IRA, that terrorism continues to flourish. If all terrorists died as the Entebbe criminals died, there would be a lot less terror.

******

The President of Peking University (yes, despite our feeble Cultural Kowtow of saying ‘Beijing’ they still call it that) says students should not be encouraged to question or to think critically because it ‘hinders steps for the future’.

He should obviously come here instead, as so many British students (and professors) are frightened out of their wits by any departure from orthodoxy, he’d fit in very well.

******

Why do feminists make fusses about nothing – such as the current persecution of a man in a lift who asked, jokingly, for someone to press the button for the ladies’ lingerie floor? It is because they long ago achieved their aims, but admitting it would mean they’d have to find something else to do.

Don’t take my word for it. The playwright David Edgar recounts this week that as far back as the 1970s a feminist manual written by the militant Anna Coote ‘had to be quickly revised because so many of its demands had been won’. In fact the left won almost everything it wanted years ago. That is why we are in such a mess.

*****

A tiny gleam of light in the endless, swirling, flatulent fog of the European debate: The possibility that Britain may remain inthe European Economic Area, so getting rid of three quarters of the EU’s laws, while not madly damaging its trade with EU countries, is still just about alive. One day, people will realise what a good idea this is.

Share this article:

06 December 2017 3:31 PM

The harder we try to ‘solve’, the Arab-Israel conflict, the worse it gets. Life for actual Arab men and women in the area can be relied on to get worse as soon as any conference is called or ‘peace deal’ signed. Whereas long periods of inaction, such as we have had recently, are followed by increased prosperity and peaceful co-existence in the main parts of the occupied Territories.

This is an invariable rule of diplomacy. So perhaps Donald Trump’s posturing about moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, which everyone says will make things worse, will paradoxically make them better. It is in fact absurd that major powers make their diplomats in Israel live and work in Tel Aviv 40 miles from the country’s Parliament and government (unless they want to speak to the Defence Ministry which is in Tel Aviv).

Some countries (the UK included) meanwhile maintain ‘consulates’ in Jerusalem which are in fact embassies to the as-yet non-existent ‘Palestinian’ state which several western governments seek to create. The UK’s is in Nashashibi Street East Jerusalem.

But there is a worse and more intractable problem, which is seldom discussed knowledgeably or intelligently. That is the condition of Gaza, the small enclave bordering Israel on its north and east, and Egypt on its south.

There are many misconceptions about Gaza. I tried to dispel some of them, after going there for the second time and writing this article some years ago

I feel my visit there greatly added to my understanding of the place. But in just a couple of days (during which I freely confess to having been extremely nervous, about the possibility of kidnap, the danger of being killed or hurt in an Israeli attack or simply being stuck there for days because the border was closed without warning), I could only glimpse.

Now my old friend Don Macintyre has written a fine and rather noble book about Gaza. It is the fruit of many months of actually living there, a pretty tough thing to have done. He and I were once fellow industrial reporters (I took over his job at the old ‘Daily Express’ in 1977 after he went to The Times. He would later work for the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Correspondent and the Independent titles). He also wrote an important biography of Peter Mandelson. Then he became a noted foreign reporter, in Iraq and then as a resident correspondent in Jerusalem. At no stage, during our time as labour reporters, political writers or foreign correspondents have Don or I agreed much about anything, though I think in my early years on the industrial beat, when I was an active Labour Party member, though of a dangerously right-wing sort, we were less divided.

But I recognise him as one of the best, most honest, most diligent and bravest journalists of our time.

And so, if he writes a book about Gaza, we must all read it. It is the least we can do in return for the courage, commitment and slog which have gone into it.

What is particularly good about this absorbing book is the personal direct experience. I have found, when reporting on the Israel problem, that one comes to respect and like people on both sides, and to mourn their losses pretty much equally. Did you know, by the way, that there is a British woman who lives in Gaza and keeps a diary about her experiences in the sort of forthright English you normally find in the North of England? Don quotes her quite a lot. There are some good jokes , too, such as the man whose once-healthy business has been ruined by excessive conflict who says ‘Gaza is like heaven. There is no work in heaven either’.

Whenever I write about the subject, I aim mainly to encourage policies which will enable the region’s people just to live normally, to work, to found families, to raise children and watch them grow into adults, to enjoy the ordinary things of life which we call peace - to have the blessings so beautifully expressed in the 128th Psalm (Miles Coverdale version) which is recited during the 1662 Prayer Book marriage service:

‘For thou shalt eat the labours of thine hands: O well is thee and happy shalt thou be. Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thine house; thy children like the olive branches round about thy table. Lo, thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord. The Lord from out of Sion shall so bless thee that thou shalt see Jerusalem in prosperity all thy life long. Yea, that thou shalt see thy children’s children, and peace upon Israel.’

I say this as a hard-line ‘Iron Wall’ Jabotinsky Zionist, who believes that Judophobia is an endemic plague which can at any time sweep the world, Europe very much included, and that the State of Israel, as a defensible and permanent Jewish state controlling its own borders and citizenship, is necessary to ensure that there is always a refuge for Jews when such outbreaks take place. This may, alas, mean some acts of calculated ruthlessness, of the sort to be found in the true and unexpurgated histories of all surviving nations.

In that article I said that better treatment of the Arabs in the region is in fact (or rather should be) one of the foundations of Israel’s security.

I should have added that a more intelligent policy would be a good idea too. Israel’s siege of Gaza punishes the wrong people. Don’s account is very persuasive about the plight of ordinary Arabs penned into Gaza, the stupid frustration of enterprise and inventiveness by a rigid and wooden-headed embargo, the cruelty of travel restrictions imposed on people who cannot possibly be a security threat – so wrecking the ambitions of fine sportsmen and athletes, and destroying the jobs and contentment which would rob the militant warlords of recruits.

Don introduces the reader to many individual men and women who are disconcertingly like us, despite living in this mad, walled-off enclave ruled by fanatics. It all underlines my belief, which I first adopted in Russia, that we must get used to the fact that catastrophes do happen, and may happen to us. And we might usefully employ this knowledge to be more sympathetic and patient about our fellow-creatures.

He explores, individually and in careful, impartial details, some of the tragedies which have engulfed ordinary Gaza families, and does not spare the reader when he describes the wounds inflicted by Israeli shells, bombs and bullets

He does not claim these actions are deliberate. They are not. But the strong implication is that the Israeli state and armed forces do not try anything like hard enough to avoid them. In my view, this verges on the deliberate, and is very dangerous to Israel for a number of reasons. But two ae vital First, it squanders the country’s international credit, without which it is in serious danger of becoming a pariah state abandoned even by the USA, in which case its future is in doubt; And it corrupts the soldiers who do it, and so corrupts the nation itself.

I have to add here that (as readers of my first link will know) I think the problem of Judophobia among the Arabs of the region is virtually insuperable, and ought to be acknowledged more than it is by Don in this book. I also think that it is accompanied by a deep-seated view that the abolition of Israel, as a Jewish state, is the unalterable aim of the Arab and Muslim cause. This is what makes any diplomatic settlement ultimately futile. An unformulated co-existence, never officially agreed, based on prosperity and an indefinite postponement of a deal is much more achievable and much more humane.

Don’s exploration of the reasons for the rise of the Hamas movement is illuminating and thoughtful. . His exploration and criticism of American, British and EU attitudes towards Hamas is deft and fascinating. He manages to make a persuasive case for ceasing to treat them as pariahs. But of course this also has to do with divisions in the Arab and Muslim world, and especially the policies of the Egyptian state which is Gaza’s second gaoler and whose actions Don often criticises. Cairo has no love for Hamas, and both Israel and the USA have a great deal of interest in maintaining Egyptian goodwill. Likewise there are many in the Arab world who have an interest in keeping Gaza miserable. The proper rehousing of its people, disgracefully prevented, would involve accepting that they are never going to back to their former homes in Israel. So they mean in slums, quite needlessly, when the wealthy Arab world could easily afford to turn Gaza into a glittering strip of new houses and flats, schools, shops and hotels, if it really chose, and if Israel had the sense to allow the materials in.

There is much, much more in this book than I can encompass here. My main feeling as, with all serious books, is to say that the author has given an important chunk of his life and thought to researching and writing it. It would be a great waste if you did not then at least read it. You will be a better person for having done so

Share this article:

30 January 2017 12:52 PM

I grow more and more baffled by the priorities of the news world. Last week the chief of Britain’s electronic spying agency, GCHQ, quit without warning or adequate reason. Robert Hannigan, we were briefly told, left his ultra-sensitive £160,000-a- year post after just two years for ‘personal reasons’ . Mr Hannigan is 51 and has previously worked as ‘director general of defence and intelligence’ at the Foreign Office. He can hardly have expected the GCHQ job to allow him to spend a lot of time at home with his family. One has to suspect a controversy. (***NOTE: On Monday 30th January Charles Moore in his Daily Telegraph column said Mr Hannigan had retired because of a 'family illness'. I have not seen any other reference to this, and was not aware of it when I wrote the article. PH***)

But far more has been written in the British press about the departure of Alexandra Shulman as editor of Vogue than about the departure of Robert Hannigan as boss of GCHQ.

Now we are all in a tizz about President Trump’s (frankly bizarre) executive orders about immigration.

Just because a lot of squeaky liberals are against these measures, it does not mean they are sensible or right. Indeed, this must be the wise person’s motto in dealing with all controversies of the Trump presidency.

As someone who has for some time openly expressed doubts about the virtue of universal suffrage democracy, and suggested ways by which it could be moderated, I am stuck in a paradox.

The people who are now most appalled by the effects of that universal suffrage democracy are exactly the same people who used to gasp or mutter ‘fascist’ when I suggested that it might have risks.

Yet here I am, annoying my own supporters by refusing to support or take part in the EU referendum, and expressing doubts about the outcome; and also annoying some of my regular readers by failing to fall in love with Mr Trump.

It isn’t Mr Trump’s politics that put me off. There’s no point telling me that he has been sound on some topic or other where we seem to share a view. I don’t think he really has any politics, apart from a vague and ill-thought-out opposition to free trade. That’s why I am not specially heartened by the occasional sensible things he has said (and now retracted or forgotten) about Russia and NATO. I suspected, and events have so far proved me right, that the foreign policy establishment would rapidly turn him into a reliable Natopolitan, gargling on about the need to defend Europe from a non-existent Russian threat.

He is learning what his minders will put up with, and what they won’t. He managed to tame himself quite effectively during Mrs May’s visit, which I think will come to be seen as a premature mistake, over time.

His cautious behaviour was presumably caused by his desire to spend a night in Buckingham Palace and have his picture taken with the Queen. He is, I think, in the White House as a rather grand souvenir-collector (he keeps the lunch-menus, we learned at the weekend) . I have long thought that when he has got enough such souvenirs, he will leave, and so become the first President to resign the office voluntarily.

The NATO issue was resolved because it really matters to his minders and doesn’t really matter to him. He’d like to have people tortured . He’s probably seen ‘Jack Bauer’ on the TV in ‘24’ saving America by torturing people. He may even get his ‘ideas’ from such shows) . His occasional escapes over the White House wall will in future be on other subjects, as we saw on Saturday. He can do damage, but as long as he does not upset the juggernaut of continuing policy, they can put up with quite a bit of this.

NATO *is* obsolete. A child could see it. You might as well maintain an alliance against the Austro-Hungarian Empire as maintain an alliance against the Soviet Union. Both have vanished, and their successor states bear no relation to the empires they once ruled.

Worse, an alliance against Russia, which in 1991 withdrew into the narrowest borders it could possibly tolerate, has to be aggressive, not defensive. The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, writing in ‘Time’ magazine, is plainly greatly alarmed, saying : ‘Politicians and military leaders sound increasingly belligerent and defence doctrines more dangerous. Commentators and TV personalities are joining the bellicose chorus. It all looks as if the world is preparing for war.’ Mr Gorbachev is one of the last really big people alive in world politics. If he thinks so, it’s worth worrying.

NATO’s chief virtue was that it was unarguably defensive. Now it is an aggressive body, promoting the very tension it claims to soothe, like a quack doctor keeping his patient ill to ensure that he carries on buying the expensive drugs he sells, and attending the costly appointments.

But Mr Trump has now clearly given up his childishly clear vision, and his sensible view that it is obsolete, , and become one of the conformist grown-ups, believing and repeating the official untruth. The Emperor has a very fine suit of clothes, after all. I’ve long thought and said the Andersen story about the Emperor’s clothes ended misleadingly. In real life the little boy and his family would have been attacked by the crowd, arrested, tortured and then (when the bruises had faded), paraded to confirm that the Emperor’s new clothes were very fine indeed, before being exiled to some pig-farm.

Now we get this stuff about banning Muslims. My response? It just isn’t serious, even though it affects quite a lot of individuals very seriously indeed. I am hilariously accused on this blog of being in some unexplained way a sympathiser with Islam, and no doubt what I say now will thicken and deepen this particular stream of ignorant, stupid drivel. My actual position is that ,if the ‘west’ really wishes to limit the influence of Islam over its societies, it needs to rediscover the Christian faith in a big way. And that crude, ignorant attacks on Muslims themselves naturally make any intelligent open-minded person come to their defence when he can, whatever he thinks of their faith.

And as long as the ‘west’ doesn’t rediscover Christianity, it flails dangerously about, mistaking strength and wealth for virtue. It puts its faith in reeking tube and iron shard, in bigger weapons, and in ‘tougher’ ‘securidee’ (which bears the same relation to true security as does ‘charidee’ to true charity), in consumer goods and in its own luxurious hedonism. This will not work. As I’ve said before, when George W. Bush used to say that Muslim militants ‘hate our way of life’, I could not forebear to chime in ‘But I also hate our way of life!’.

For I do. The ‘West’ only exists as a coherent part of the world because of the Christian morals, and the extremely high levels of trust and lawfulness based upon them, which allowed Europe and the Anglosphere to develop as they have. Islam has virtues (they have much, for instance, to teach us about hospitality and the care of the old). But Islamic societies have simply not managed to achieve levels of trust and law comparable to those in Christian lands. This could explain why Islam (if you discount oil) has not achieved any great economic success, why education, publishing, freedom of speech and thought do not greatly flourish under its influence - and I am sceptical of claims of Islamic paradises in the distant past.

But our advantages, like our infrastructure and our other stores of wealth, material and moral, are inherited. We are not replenishing them. We are wearing them out. We have drawn heavily on our balances and obtained a great deal of moral and political credit on the basis of a reputation won by others which we no longer deserve.

In military terms, our scientific advances have stalled, if not gone backwards. Modern TV techniques combined with the methods of ‘people power’ which are increasingly the main weapon in international conflict, have completely (for example) neutralised Israel’s former military superiority over her neighbours. In Iraq and Libya we merely demonstrated that superior physical force can destroy but not create. Russia’s genius in Syria was to use its superior weaponry *alongside* an existing polity which could make good use of airpower. Our stupidity in Libya was to lend our airpower to the forces of anarchy, who knew what they didn’t want but had no ability to take advantage of the victory we gave them.

I see no sign that Mr Trump, or anyone else in Washington or London, has yet understood this. His wild pledge to eradicate Islamist terror from the earth, at his inauguration, was actively alarming. How can any mentally coherent person make such boasts? But it is dispiritingly similar to the rhetorical ‘we will find these cowards and punish them’ view emitted by Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush, and British leaders, not to mention the French - now living under an absurd and futile state of emergency which shows every sign of becoming permanent.

Since Mr Trump so famously doesn’t read, can someone arrange for him to have a late-night viewing of Gille Pontecorvo’s brilliant, rending film (based on researched facts and thinly fictionalised) about terror, counter-terror, torture and propaganda ‘The Battle of Algiers’. Maybe he’ll miss the point. But perhaps he might get it, see what might be wrong with the Jack Bauer view of life, and so save us all a lot of trouble.

He is plainly listening to some establishment voices, even while appearing to be off the leash. This does not mean he is prepared to be sensible for its own sake (his Russian opinions, as discussed, were more sensible than those of the establishment), just that he will listen to others when the issue isn’t especially dear to his heart. As he revealed his chaotic, illogical and foolish ‘extreme vetting’ plan, Mr Trump mentioned the September 11 2001 attacks as its ultimate justification. But most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt. All of these are Arab countries with which the USA maintains close military and political relations. But none of these countries was on Mr Trump’s list, which did by contrast contain Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. You got a sense of someone saying ‘OK, have your stupid immigration ban, if you must, as long as you don’t annoy these people while you’re doing it’.

Then there’s the question of whether Mr Trump should be a guest of the Queen. I find it hard to see a principle at stake here. Her Majesty has had to spend time with Martin McGuinness, with the appalling old waxworks who run China, with the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu, with Robert Mugabe (and plenty of other horrors who attend Commonwealth conferences). But I think it might be wise to set the visit quite a long way off, so that we have some leverage. Mr Trump will understand that. It is Britain’s biggest asset in any bargain with Mr Trump, he really wants it, and it should not be given away until we can be quite sure we will get something in return.

Meanwhile I think events have so far shown that Mr Trump is pretty much as bad as he looked, but will moderate and restrain his behaviour whenever the issue at stake doesn’t really bother him. Not much to rejoice about but ,hey, this wasn’t my idea.

01 January 2017 1:20 AM

What a good thing it is that most criminals cannot read very well. For the Home Office has revealed that nearly half of all recorded crimes now go unsolved, because the police cannot identify the culprit.

Our criminal justice system is like one of those French Foreign Legion forts in the Sahara, where the battlements are manned by cardboard figures.

As soon as the besiegers spot the deception, they can sweep inside, howling with glee.

But for the moment we are living in the brief interval before the wicked among us grasp that nothing stands in their way any more. Enjoy it while you can.

Law-abiding classes and criminal classes alike are still fooled by the cardboard figures. They see the occasional police officer whizzing by in a noisy car, or chatting to his colleague about overtime on a public-relations ‘patrol’ of a wholly safe and tranquil area in broad daylight.

They read of trials, which do actually still take place despite the frantic efforts of the authorities to head them off with ‘restorative justice’, cautions, fixed penalties and other negotiations.

There are even prisons, though these are reserved mostly for hardened criminals who have committed so many crimes that the authorities have run out of excuses for letting them off. And they might as well be made of cardboard too, since there are so few staff that the inmates run them, they seethe with illegal drugs and other crime, and very few sentences are fully served.

And there is now an active elite campaign to send even fewer people to prison – which would be stupid even if the actual level of crime and disorder wasn’t still shooting up. Which it is. For it is not just the illiterate criminals who are unaware of what is going on. Millions of educated people genuinely believe the crime figures, or don’t understand what they mean.

Your eye may have slipped past the word ‘recorded’ in my first paragraph. But it is vital to know that huge quantities of crime are never recorded at all. This is because the victims of it are afraid of their assailants and know the police are powerless to help, so judge it wiser to keep quiet; or it is because those victims know from experience that nothing will be done if they do complain.

Or it is because the figures have been blatantly fiddled (as police witnesses revealed to Parliament’s Public Administration Committee at its hearing on November 19, 2013). Or it is just because the police are so hard to reach, and so uninterested in investigating unless you have the whole thing recorded in 3D colour with soundtrack and a signed confession from the culprit (I exaggerate slightly, but not much). And who can blame them?

The state prosecutors will almost certainly drop the case anyway, so scared are they of losing in court. Justice is one of many things starved of money by the liberal state.

What we have done is reclassify many former crimes as normal acceptable actions, just as we have succeeded in reclassifying organised ignorance as education and permanent unemployment as ‘self-employment’ or ‘disability’. First it was all the things that fall into the category of ‘anti-social behaviour’, including public drunkenness, then vandalism, then shoplifting, now it’s burglary and car crime. What’s next for normalisation? Mugging?

This is the origin of the repeated official claim (laughable to the residents of our rougher areas) that ‘crime is falling’. No, what is falling is our civilisation. It is falling slowly, like the atmospheric pressure on the Shipping Forecast, but falling all the same.

And all I get for saying so is abuse from police officers who wrongly claim I am attacking them personally. I am not. They are trapped in a system over which they have no power. Yet they must know the truth. So why do they chide me for pointing it out, rather than protest to their chiefs and to MPs about the scandal that grows unchecked all around us?

While I never liked the politics of President Barack Obama, and warned from the start that he was overrated, I had some respect for him as an intelligent and thoughtful person.

His final weeks – in which he seems to have decided to spite his successor with petty, self-indulgent and damaging actions against Israel and Russia – have put paid to that.

Did anyone in authority notice that the culprit of the Berlin Christmas market outrage turned out – yet again – to be a drug-abusing petty criminal?

They almost always are. But the police and security services resolutely look elsewhere for suspects.

This is because they need to believe in conspiracy theories and global plots, as this makes them feel important.

Also they are not interested in the dull work of enforcing the laws against ordinary crime and drug possession. Congratulations to the Italian police for having proper foot patrols after dark.

Indulgent BBC has its history wrong, again

Agatha Christie’s Witness For The Prosecution was a successful play before becoming a classic film of the 1950s.

It’s not a work of genius, but it is a good courtroom drama with a surprise at the end. How could the BBC possibly have made such a mess of it, as it did in its TV version last week?

The answer is simple. The BBC cannot leave the past alone, but does not understand that it was really different from the present.

It thinks that if it shows enough characters smoking, and shoots everything in a sort of gravy-stained dingy light, it has recreated the 1920s.

I think I counted seven people lighting up cigarettes in the first two minutes. After that, I stopped counting in case I got cancer.

I also spotted characters, plainly supposed to be reporters, smoking in court during an Old Bailey trial, which in the real 1920s would have earned them a spell in the cells for contempt of court.

Having done this, it made most of the characters (including a cat) behave and speak as if they were appearing in EastEnders.

A knighted barrister unhesitatingly used the f-word. The police were shown as thugs who arrested a suspect by bursting in on him without a warrant and beating him with truncheons, even though he was asleep in bed. Nobody seemed to know the law of England.

Lawyers blatantly and unlawfully coached witnesses. The only Christian (of course) was a plain, sour, repressed lesbian with a secret passion for her mistress, who was then wrongfully hanged.

A cat was lingeringly shown licking up its dead owner’s blood. A character who had been gassed in the war was shown coughing up yet more blood. No doubt this is all much more modern and ‘truthful’ than the 1957 film version.

But it is also much worse, and the portentous music and pretentious camera work only underline that.

The BBC licence fee is not collected under the threat of imprisonment to allow people to indulge themselves in this way.

The interesting thing about peace between Israel and the Arabs is that the more we talk about it, the less of it we get.

The past few years (in which there have been no major negotiations) have been among the quietest in the West Bank in recent times, and many people have managed to get on with reasonably happy lives there, which I should have thought a good thing.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Share this article:

12 September 2016 1:58 PM

I have no reason to love Emily Thornberry, a Labour blowhard whose explosion of phoney outrage I once had to wipe away and then denounce during a BBC Question Time appearance in Stockton-on-Tees, when we were on the same panel.

Perhaps that’s why I stood by when Ms Thornberry, whose interesting background is worth studying, was oddly pilloried for a not especially outrageous tweet during the Rochester and Strood by-election.

I could never see that this really deserved the level of criticism it received. It appeared to reflect an attitude which I would have thought was shared by most of the people who then attacked her. The fury of the left-wing elite towards Corbynistas is a very odd thing. I’m fascinated by the ‘anti-Semitism’ charge against the Corbynites, which certainly has some justification, given their sympathy for anti-Israel factions. But those who make this charge have in many cases for years swallowed and repeated anti-Israel propaganda which I have always regarded as being selective criticism founded in an unacknowledged Judophobia. Put it like this. I've never been able to find another explanation for their special concentration on the undoubted faults of Israel, and their lack of interest in the parallel faults of other countries.

But now she’s been caught out not knowing the name of the French Foreign Minister, I feel I must speak up for her. I do not know the name of the French Foreign Minister, even though I read it this morning. It just hasn’t stuck. I’d have to look it up, or write it on my sleeve if I were, by some sort of nightmare chance, Shadow Foreign Secretary. And no wonder. I will be unlikely to need it. Once, I would have done (especially when it was the gloriously named Maurice Couve de Murville, whose comings and goings were incessant in the 1960s) . And for ages I could also confidently have identified the German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dieter Genscher.

Long ago now, I tried to maintain a pretty close interest in the politics of the main continental countries, closely studying the relevant pages of the FT and The Times. I thought this was the sort of thing an informed person ought to know. When I visited France I could usually pick up the thread of French politics by reading Le Monde, but it’s all gone now. The end of the Cold War, and the death of truly independent countries caused by the EU, has made foreign governments as interesting as district councils in faraway bits of the West Midlands.

There was a time in the mid-60s when I could confidently have identified every British MP by his or her constituency, especially enjoying the fact that Frank Hooley was MP for Heeley, then a division of Sheffield. Now I stare blankly at pictures of the Cabinet, wondering who they are and not feeling much more informed when people give me their names. (‘Who? Who?’ I ask, echoing the Duke of Wellington’s querulous, bellowed response to Lord Derby’s 1852 Cabinet of unknowns). For years I struggled to remember that George Osborne was the name of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Something in my mind wanted to reject this information. It still does.

So Ms Thornberry seems to me to have a point when she complains that she’s being singled out when she’s asked to name the French Foreign Minister on live TV. Yes, I know she is actually planning to meet the nameless Frenchman. But I’m sure she’d have got it right in time for the meeting. And, despite considering myself well-informed, I can easily imagine being caught out on such a thing. Also, like her in her Shadow Defence Secretary period , I didn’t know what a Defcon was, though I could identify a CEP, know roughly what Tritium is (and where you might just encounter it) , can tell a SLCM from an SLBM, know the difference between a warship and a battleship and can distinguish an air-superiority fighter from a strike aircraft and a tank from a self-propelled gun.

And I have to ask, did her interrogator know who the French Foreign Minister was, much before he asked the question? And how would he do on a quickfire quiz on leading continental politicians or, come to that, the names of Barack Obama’s Cabinet? More important, what do most political journalists really know about history, foreign affairs or anything much? All they need to know is the line of the day, who’s in and who’s out - and they’re safe.

This sort of failing isn’t quite the same as not knowing the price of a loaf or a pint of milk or a stamp. Such things (which politicians now rehearse frenziedly at election times) are tests of whether you have entirely lost touch with the world of normal people. I’m glad they feel they ought to know. Though they don’t mean much if you don’t also know what the average household’s take-home pay and average debts are, what it costs to rent a house or flat in the South-East, or the outrageous price of a two-mile bus ride.

Share this article:

08 August 2016 1:08 PM

The day after I had this on-stage conversation with Ken Livingstone, he made his infamous remarks about Hitler and Zionism. I apologise for the sound quality, but some of you might find it interesting.

01 May 2016 1:18 AM

I have known and disagreed with Ken Livingstone for nearly 40 years. I especially loathe his slippery excuse-making for the IRA, and I think he has done more damage to this country than almost any other figure on the Left.But it is ridiculous to call him an ‘apologist for Hitler’, or to suggest that he is an anti-Jewish bigot. I was just leaving the BBC’s Westminster studios on Thursday when Mr Livingstone stepped into an over-excited knot of political reporters. They looked like what they are – simultaneously a pack of snapping wolves, buzzing with self-righteousness, and a flock of bleating, conformist sheep, all thinking and saying exactly the same thing. After undergoing a minute or two of synthetic rage and baying, the former Mayor of London politely excused himself and went to the lavatory. The flock waited outside, restored for a moment to calm and reason. Then Ken popped out again and the wild shouting and pushing resumed, as if a switch had been pressed. At one point this stumbling, squawking carnival was joined by a barking dog. If it had gone on much longer, crowds of tourists would have gathered, mistaking it for an ancient London tradition. This is how politics is reported in this country, almost completely without thought.I am, as it happens, a keen Zionist, a confirmed supporter of Israel’s continued existence as an avowedly Jewish state. Anti-Semitism – or Judophobia as I call it – gives me the creeps. So does the extraordinarily selective criticism of Israel, which does many bad things, by people who never seem to notice the equally bad crimes of any other country. I ask them: ‘Why is this?’ They can never answer. And as it happens I had on Wednesday evening taken Mr Livingstone to task (at a London public meeting) for the Left’s feebleness in face of Muslim Judophobia.This is a sad fact. On visits to the Muslim world, from Egypt to Iran, Iraq and Jordan, via the Israeli-occupied West Bank, I have repeatedly met foul and bigoted opinions about Jews which people in this country would be ashamed to speak out loud. I have no doubt that there are plenty of Muslims who do not harbour such views. But there are those who do, and British political parties which seek the support of Muslims have often been coy about challenging this. As for all these people who have suddenly got so exercised about Judophobia, and wildly worked up about Ken Livingstone’s batty views on Zionism (standard issue on the far Left for decades), I have some questions for them.Are you prepared to put the same energy into challenging and denouncing Judophobia among the Palestinians you support abroad, and the British Muslims whose votes you seek here? Because, if not, I might suspect that you are just using the issue to try to win back control of the Labour Party, which you lost last summer in a fair fight.

The crude murder of a gripping story

This country seethes with scandals brought about by excessive political correctness. Yet many police dramas end up reaching for a particular sort of child sexual abuse, in which seemingly respectable conservative people are exposed as corrupt villains, as the root of the mystery they seek to solve. Line Of Duty, the BBC’s latest much praised cop drama, took the same line. It’s a failure of imagination, mixed with Leftish politics. Perhaps that’s why its author also resorted to a ludicrous closing scene, in which a real, tense drama of interrogation, slowly moving towards a stinging conclusion, was abruptly ended by a crude shoot-out and a cruder car chase.

I am not interested in football and do not like it. I am loathed by many in the police because I criticise their aloof arrogance and their lack of interest in our problems. I dislike The Sun newspaper. I think Liverpool is a great and majestic city.So don’t bother accusing me of serving any agenda when I say that I don’t like the unanimous Diana-style hysteria that seems to be developing over the Hillsborough tragedy. It is beyond belief that every police officer present was the devil incarnate. It is beyond belief that every football supporter present was a shining angel.Those accused of criminal wrongdoing in this horrible event must be permitted to defend themselves and their reputations without being attacked for daring to do so. The presumption of innocence, never more important than when an unpopular defendant is on trial, must be enforced. In our free courts nobody is indefensible, and nobody should be denied the liberty to defend himself. Tragedy is no excuse for injustice.

Clegg's drugs confession

Some things are unsayable in British politics. One such is the truth that cannabis has been, for many years, a decriminalised drug. The police, the CPS and the courts have given up any serious effort to arrest and prosecute users, just as evidence starts to pour in that it is extremely dangerous.Instead our elite moan about ‘prohibition’, which does not exist, and the cruel ‘criminalisation’ of dope-smokers, which would be their own fault if it happened, but actually doesn’t. Arrests for this offence are rarer every week, and some police forces openly say they don’t do it any more. Only two years ago, when he was Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg claimed in The Sun newspaper that we were throwing supposedly harmless drug users into prison at the rate of a thousand a year. I’ve never been able to find out where this figure comes from. But on Thursday, he dramatically changed his tune. I extracted from him, on live TV, the most honest thing any senior British politician has actually said on the subject.‘There is sort of de facto decriminalisation of cannabis going on… it’s not a very remarkable discovery. Everyone knows it.‘Of course there is de facto decriminalisation … let’s have a bit of honesty that decriminalisation is happening de facto.’He acted as if he’d been saying this all along. Has anyone else ever heard him do so? The incessant lie that we are waging a failed ‘war on drugs’ with prohibition and persecution only fuels the cynical, greedy campaign for full legalisation. If this succeeds, we will get advertising of drugs, drugs on sale on the internet and in the high street, and untold irreversible misery. Now at least Mr Clegg, of all people, has exposed that lie. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

****

Yet another report, this time from the London School of Economics, identifies Synthetic Phonics as an excellent method of teaching children to read. It is by far the best. But many schools still resist it, or dilute it in a ‘mixture of methods’. More than 60 years after Rudolf Flesch explained ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read’ in a famous book, we still refuse to act on the evidence.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

24 January 2016 2:07 AM

The police are too powerful. They are also too feeble. Unless we put both these things right very soon, this will become a very dangerous country.

We are all less free than we used to be. We have to be careful what we say, especially if we work in the public sector. We are under constant surveillance, from CCTV cameras, and thanks to snoopers who monitor our calls and internet use. If, for some reason, the authorities take against us we can be plunged, in an instant, into an unexpected underworld of highly publicised suspicion that can last for years and ruin us with legal fees, even if at the end they sullenly drop the charges.

Nobody is safe from this. If a field marshal in his 90s can be raided at home by 20 officers at breakfast time, and subjected to questioning and searches on the basis of the wild fantasies of an unhappy nobody, then so can you. And though the police themselves will insist they have not released your name, don’t be surprised if this Trial By Plod somehow becomes very public, very quickly.

The police are too powerful. They are also too feeble. Unless we put both these things right very soon, this will become a very dangerous country

Yet, at the same time, ordinary crime and bad behaviour – the things the law now regards as trivial – grow unchecked around us. Who now lives in a town free of graffiti and vandalism, or one where Friday night has not become menacing, drunken and loud?

Years ago, when I first noticed that something had gone badly wrong with the police, readers would write in and chide me for being rude about a force they still trusted. I get very little of that now. Respect for the police has largely disappeared among the law-abiding classes, and seldom survives any actual contact with them. Now I brace myself for apparently organised abuse from police officers themselves. I should warn them that this behaviour only helps to make my point.

Their ‘I’m all right Jack’ mentality and refusal to accept just criticism is as bad as anything trade unionists used to do and say back in the 1970s.

I have to say, because I hope it is true, that not all police officers have this mentality, but a distressing number do.

The police have been subjected to a 30-year inquisition and revolution, in which old-fashioned coppers have been pushed aside (and into retirement) by commissars of equality and diversity. Deprived of their proper occupation, preventive patrolling on foot (long ago abolished), they have become officious paramilitary social workers. These new police are obsessed with the supposed secret sins of the middle class, and indifferent to the cruel and callous activities of the criminal class.

They are also in the grip of a dogma that excuses ordinary crime by blaming it on bad housing and ‘poverty’ (in one of the world’s most advanced welfare states).

Only a small part of this crime even reaches the courts any more. Much of it is dealt with, if at all, by empty ‘cautions’ and laughable ‘restorative justice’. The police can then concentrate on what really bothers them. Yet when they turn sternly on the middle classes, they act like continental examining magistrates, who assume everyone is guilty before trial (and sometimes even say so) and demand that suspects co-operate in their own prosecution.

They can arrest, noisily and in large numbers and at miserable times of day, to punish people who have never been found guilty of anything. In most cases, these people would have come willingly to an interview. They can seize property vital to people’s livelihoods, and hang on to it for months. They can grant supposed ‘police bail’, so allowing them to keep their chosen victims under suspicion for years.

When these things mysteriously become public, they can deny responsibility, and who can prove otherwise?

This is oppressive, dangerous and scandalous. The treatment of Lord Bramall may be the last warning we get that it has gone too far, and the best chance to turn the police back into the friends of the public, and the enemies of crime and disorder.

******

Picking a fight we cannot win

Do you really think the Russian deep state couldn’t have murdered Alexander Litvinenko secretly, in such a way that we could never have traced it to them?

The oddest thing about this case is the use of a violently radioactive, totally traceable poison, and the conduct of the two alleged killers, whose revolting deed was mismanaged in a way that would be comic if a man had not died as a result.

Meanwhile, the two suspects prance about in public (I once met a smirking Andrei Lugovoi in Moscow, as he strolled through an expensive hotel).

This is surely a gesture of angry contempt, against which Moscow knows we are more or less powerless to react effectively. We might wonder why. Maybe it has something to do with our courts refusing to extradite people such as the Chechen leader Akhmed Zakayev, regarded in Moscow as terrorists, and then giving them political asylum.

Whether this decision was right or wrong (and I don’t know enough to say), you can see why it might annoy them. Despite being an increasingly insignificant country, we have got ourselves involved with some big and nasty people in a rather rough neighbourhood. I hope it’s worth it.

******

At least poor Leo's not on the 6.22 from Paddington

There’s one good reason to see the overrated new film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s not as good as they say. I longed for subtitles and the only character whose dialogue I clearly understood was the grizzly bear. She said ‘Grrrrrr’ as if she meant it.

But if you are a regular railway commuter, this immensely long movie will reconcile you to your lot. After what seems like about nine hours, unable to get to the lavatory, confronted with incessant cold, revolting meals of raw offal, charmless travelling companions, your uncomfortable journey frequently interrupted by unexplained disasters or pure spite, the 6.22 from Paddington begins to seem like paradise. Even when, as recently happened to me, you are turned out of the train by ‘Great Western’ on to a freezing platform halfway through your journey home and told it is for your own good.

There’s one good reason to see the overrated new film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. If you are a regular railway commuter, this immensely long movie will reconcile you to your lot.

****

The Government wants you to support the renewal of the absurdly elaborate and huge Trident missile system. I see that the Defence Ministry organised, as a complete coincidence, a press trip to show off the red Scalextric-type nuclear trigger I was allowed to play with aboard HMS Repulse 30 years ago. Well, Israel, a more fearsome nuclear power than us, facing a greater danger, doesn’t waste its money on such a luxury item.

Spending £100billion on Trident, and neglecting your conventional forces as a result, is like spending so much on insuring yourself against abduction by aliens that you can’t afford cover for fire and theft.

*******

My thanks to all of you who remembered my friend Jason Rezaian, unjustly imprisoned in Iran, in your thoughts and prayers, and who wrote to the Iranian authorities urging his release. After more than 500 days in a Tehran prison, and some nervous final hours as diplomats ensured his wife was able to leave the country with him, Jason is now free again, and recovering in a US military hospital. I am sure that you played your part in securing his release.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Share this article:

19 November 2015 12:49 PM

Some readers may like to see last Sunday's 'Sunday Morning Live', available for a limited time on BBC iplayer, in which I discuss the Paris Atrocities, the campaign for a cultural boycott of Israel , and the fiction of 'addiction'